Even now he notices her sometimes while he has his wife...but she started in on him long ago, he's wondered if he will ever be rid of her...

She never begs but only feeds. Usually, he's not aware of her. In the distance, or so much in the foreground she blots out all else, these days the whisper of that moment faint, still the nausea it induces can overwhelm him even now.

Her body is superfluous - he's desired a dozen different girls. Many funny, charming, smart. Some not. Some simply slutty or obnoxious, when he was bent on self-destruction.

The scene shifts, is shifting, has shifted.

A long expanse of flattened fields that could be greenery, plants of some sort, but aren't and only look like it, in a sky, pastel washed with white all a bit electric against the fog of his mind and the writhing hips of the thing. The Thing. The ugly intense pressure of the bone slipped around his jutting point, cutting into the base of his human bilateral symmetry, cutting up into him from the bottom chakra, trying to draw him down to the lowest levels of existence. He has tried to avoid this moment his whole life, tried to hold on to his essence. The facial contortions, the chiaroscuro and blur.

The feel of fine hair, thicker rough hair, a sweet smell, a languorous smell, an earth lotion and perfume, mixing, changing beneath him, almost visible somewhere behind this new scene of an electric world, wavering, mirage like, slightly ineffable. Still in the fields, maybe where you go when you die, or maybe where you wait just before you're born. Suspended miles high as jet trails or some impossible architecture - boxes hang upside down, giant chest trunk boxes, wooden looking but undefined, a little hazy, containing dark interiors. The boxes hang upside down in a sky he shouldn't be seeing, seems less than real, against all logic.

Her pelvis clenches and unclenches, a tightness along with the wet, chewing the something-ness of him, he fears, or knows, or doesn't want to know. Standing on the plain, far from the act, something tells him, if he could just see inside those boxes suspended in the sky, everything would be better.

He never makes a sound, he never explodes, or sighs, or burst forth. He never quietly shakes. It's almost like he's trying to make it not happen or to stay always in control, which is not possible, when thought about from a reasonable perspective, which is not to say that she of the Thing, whatever, the multi-named and headed Thing is, in fact, in the right. She's not. Not even. Still he tries not to give over to It - why did he do this?

"You want it." And, "I'm the one everyone wants." Dreadful atonal clunkers like that. But still he went for it. Goes for it. Thinks about it even now, vertiginous rising into view against all that there is now. If he loses control, he's going to pay. The thing will steal a chunk of him and make him pay, eat him, try and capture his soul. Ruin what he built in the future - did he see the rest of his life in that moment only to be secretly also somehow dead, and viewing it from the outside? This other scene so peaceful and far away yet... yet. Somehow the challenge of this lures him here. The deafening hollows of the boxes overhead, in that other place he's seeing into.

So it's got to end somewhere - she's making sounds, It's making sounds. He wants to disengage, untangle, climb shakily to his feet and run, not walk, from this mistake. Had he known the deal he was making, would he have still? Maybe. Probably. Why? He wonders, but thinks the answer is mired somewhere under sophistry in that space between love and that negative thing that masquerades as desire. (Where do you go when you die?)

He's caught in a loop of her skin, somewhere inside her, he's caught in his own future. He made it all right now, has seen it all. A life that's whole and complete created by this moment. Real love, and connectedness. He's also rising into the compartmentalized spaces in the sky. Dark things hovering above him, the things contain the parts of his life he would rather not examine. His own inadequacies, mistakes, misconceptions hidden somewhere just out of view in that area between awake and asleep, here, late at night, fucking this thing, he sees it clearer than he wants to. The loop of skin pulls on the smaller of his heads, and her groan radiates down through her, touching the pulsing headwaters of the beginning, and it's over. His life is over. Again. The boxes open, rain the bad things concealed down into his conscious viewing. The cone of his vision disturbed. For a moment he sees the Thing clearly and it is just what he imagined it to be - a monster. A petty, singular monster, with no real power except to extinguish his small existence by starting his real life. It's really laughable - unfortunately it has taken him. His life passing from him into her. Heat, and heat death, not breathing. Waiting. The kindnesses aren't kind at all and now like plunging into freezing air, skyward, falling. She's stroking his deadness, his limp form and saying, "Wasn't it good?"

He turns over in bed, now far away, awake and breathing, born, and snuggles into the nape of his wife's neck, crooks an arm around her waist and the bones of her ribs. He lies there until being morphs again. [end]

“These Ugly Elysian Fields” Copyright JAY WRIGHT 2002

----

also by Jay Wright:
A Dictionary Of Gods Or A California Primer

----

HOARD MAGAZINE